January 23, 2003
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Michael Aurbach, professor of art at Vanderbilt, has been elected president of the College Art Association (CAA), a national organization of more than 14,000 individual artists, art historians and other visual arts and museum professionals.
Aurbach is the first faculty member from a Southern university elected to this position since 1958. His term runs through 2004.
"For the next few years universities will be experiencing an explosion in the student population while the financial and physical infrastructure to support that growth lags behind,” said Aurbach. “CAA will play an important role in monitoring these problems as they relate to the visual arts.”
A CAA member since 1982 and a board member since 1999, Aurbach helped to pioneer the organization’s mentoring program, which has assisted more than 2,000 graduate students from schools across the country since 1997. In November, Aurbach led a professional development workshop for art students at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, co-sponsored by the Getty Research Institute and CAA.
“The organization will continue to explore ways to help members through innovative career development services, maintaining high professional standards and programming to promote excellence in scholarship and creative production,” said Aurbach.
Aurbach’s involvement with professional issues became national in scope more than 12 years ago when he brought attention to a variety of issues surrounding professional standards for promotion and tenure. In1989, CAA asked him to serve on a panel reviewing the association’s professional standards.
“Our work served as an eye-opener on the status of the profession,” he said. “The work of this committee led to a much-needed revision of the ‘Standards for the Retention and Tenure of Visual Arts Faculty,’ which was more than 20 years old.”
Aurbach holds a master of fine arts degree from the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. He earned a master of arts degree in art history and holds a diverse range of undergraduate degrees in studio art, journalism and biology from the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He has taught sculpture and drawing at Vanderbilt since 1986.
As an artist, Aurbach’s work frequently delivers social commentary, as with the large-format sculpture The Administrator, the 2001 inaugural installation of contemporary art at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tenn. With more than 50 solo exhibitions to his credit, Aurbach has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Southern Arts Federation, the Tennessee Arts commission, Art Matters, the Puffin Foundation and Vanderbilt.
More information and a gallery of Aurbach’s work is available at: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/finearts/aurbach/.
-VU-